Anne Sexton Research Paper

1642 Words7 Pages
Ever come in contact with an overly personal, in your face, incompetent person who really nags at your last nerve? To many people in 1950, this person was poet Anne Sexton. Her poems outraged conservative society, not only because she was a woman engulfing fame into her life, but because she wrote about topics which made people morbidly uncomfortable, such as masturbation, abortion, incest, and menopause. Her widely read poetry sensationalized intimate experiences, making her poetry an “intense manifesto” (Davidson 2) of “gender specific experiences” (Rich 1-2). These poems were written in spite of her therapist, Dr. Sidney Martin, who, after helping Anne through her breakdowns, told her to use poetry as an outlet for her emotions (Martin 482). Anne “used her knowledge of the human condition-- often painful, but sometimes joyous, to create poems” (Martin 3). Anne Sexton’s confessional poetry reflected her miserable view of the world due to her depressive state. She wrote with penetrating honesty…show more content…
Her divorce caused her downfall as she lost her sense of self-confidence and became “heavily dependant on therapists, medications and close friends” (Levstick 3), here is why many people believe she is relatable, she is dependent just like many people who read her poetry. However Anne Sexton’s downfall occurred after Maxine Kumin and Sexton had lunch in a cafe on October 4th 1974. After returning home, Sexton poured herself a glass of vodka, put on her mother's fur coat and locked herself in her garage and started the car. A woman who handed us “a genre that appears radically to reverse the normal social order, in which the poor become rich, and the ugly become beautiful,” (George 5) and had an “influence on the rising feminist movement,” (Rich 2), subcommed to her suicidal urges, and died of carbon monoxide
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  • Anne Sexton Research Paper

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    Anne Sexton Anne Sexton, born Anne Gray Harvey, was an American poet. She was born November 9th, 1928, in Newton, Massachusetts, and died October 4th, Weston, Massachusetts, at the age of 45. She was known for being a confessional poet, in which she wrote primarily about her struggles with depression, suicidal tendencies and mania. She had won a Pulitzer Prize for her book of poetry, called Live Or Die, in 1967. Sexton started writing poetry while attending Rogers Hall, a preparatory school for

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